Mike Winters and his brother Bernie were a popular television comedy double-act who might have been more highly regarded but for an inevitable comparison with their near contemporaries, Eric Morecambe and Ernie Wise.

Like Morecambe and Wise, they had started as teenagers and were initially influenced by the cross-talk style of the American pair, Abbott and Costello. Like Morecambe and Wise, too, they served a long and often bumpy apprenticeship before starting to hit their peak on television in the 1960s.

While Morecambe and Wise, helped by outstanding scriptwriters, developed their act and pushed it into new and more ambitious